It’s a jungle out there when it comes to apps, so here is help for you to set up your flower business for greater success
By Andrew Joseph
In our March 2024 issue and on our website (floristsreview.com/ai-and-your-flower-business), we presented an article entitled “AI and Your Flower Business.” That article includes dozens of our top-pick AI-powered apps and platforms for small businesses that can help with specific floral creative and business issues. However, we didn’t tell you why those apps are so good for you. Even in this issue, we lack the space to provide you with a rundown on all 60-some of those, but we do take a deeper dive into at least one relevant app in each category—excluding SEO (wait for our September issue for that).
Copywriting, Content Generation and Editing
For copywriting, content generation and editing, how about two of the better-known applications: for editing, Grammarly (grammarly.com), and for copywriting and other content generation, ChatGPT (chatgpt.com)?
Grammarly checks and offers suggestions for spelling, grammar and punctuation, but be warned that sometimes it may not understand colloquial language or spelling usage. FYI, Grammarly is on this writer’s Microsoft Word software. I didn’t ask for it; I didn’t know I wanted it, but wow, it’s useful. There is a free version of Grammarly and a paid subscription version—the free one being more basic, providing the user with grammar and spelling suggestions while the premium version offers in-depth grammar suggestions that might make a native writer wonder if he or she ever passed freshman English.
Now, ChatGPT is the AI droid you have been looking for. In short, it’s pretty amazing—and it’s easy to use. ChatGPT will create content for you—provided you tell it specifically what you want and/or are looking for. It will save you time researching the information you need and writing it.
Will it always give you perfect grammar? No. Will it steal from other websites? Yes. That’s why we recommend that you take any information that ChatGPT or any other similar AI gives you and rewrite it (it should sound like you, anyway) and then have Grammarly check it.
As well, if it creates something that is punctuated with supposed “facts,” it’s always best to confirm those. Although many humans are working for various AI sites that are “teaching” the AI computer system, mistakes are made. Humans invented AI, and humans are teaching AI and feeding it information generated by humans, and, well, humans are not perfect.
ChatGPT can be used to generate copy for ads, blogs, letters, contracts and much more. Or it can rewrite copy you have prepared. Or it can analyze how effective your copy is, such as if you ask it to analyze the copy for, say, accuracy in talking with a specific demographic.
Of course, AI is still in its infancy, so maybe don’t ask ChatGPT for an opinion. Just have it stick to the “facts”—and then verify them. You could also ask ChatGPT for ideas to help you gain and keep more customers, but you would have to feed it exacting data.
Graphic Design and Content Creation
One of our favorite AI apps is Canva (canva.com), known for its ease of use in graphic design. While this app requires no professional expertise in graphic design, it does require you to already have a few things in place, such as a logo, brand colors and fonts. Canva will use those items to ensure that everything else it creates for you remains on brand, as it provides thousands of templates that you can customize to make it oh so you.
The app will also allow you to create and schedule social media content for different social media accounts. To flesh things out, you can upload photos and videos of your product offerings, your store and your team. and you can edit them all as needed. You can also create posters, fliers and signage by adding your information to a Canva template. Ready, set, done.
Canva even has templates to create business cards. And remember how we said you should already have a logo? Well, if you don’t, or if you want to create a new one, Canva can help you design a high-quality business logo with one of its templates.
Canva can help you save hours every week with its easy-to-use features for designing, editing, scheduling, and sharing social media posts, fliers and other collateral.
Business Plans, Sales Strategies and Forecasts
For creating business plans and sales strategies and forecasts, check out Upmetrics (upmetrics.co), which uses a combination of data-driven insights, AI-powered planning and user-friendly interfaces. (NOTE: Do not confuse Upmetrics with the similarly named UpMetrics [upmetrics.com], which helps companies create positive social positioning.)
Within the software, Upmetrics provides a step-by-step navigation to create a business plan. If you want a loan to start a business or to expand your business, you are more likely to be successful if you can show a business plan. Upmetrics has more than 400 sample plans across various industries, including flower retailing. There’s also AI-powered content generation to help turn your spoken ideas into a satisfying business plan.
The software allows users to input sales and expense figures to calculate upcoming monthly, quarterly and yearly financial expectations. With real-time financial forecasts, it can help you understand your financial trajectory and make informed decisions. All that said, while Upmetrics can provide economic insights, for a business plan to be successful, it still requires an understanding of the flower industry, customers and one’s own business operations.
Marketing and Branding
Although Florists’ Review continually offers excellent advice on marketing and branding your business, there is no such thing as too much help. Mailchimp (mailchimp.com)—for email marketing—and Flick (flick.social)—for social marketing copywriting, scheduling, hashtaging and analytics—are two excellent tools to consider.
Flick helps businesses find the best #hashtags to use on social media. Do you know all those people online with an outrageous number of followers who make money by being an influencer or simply someone who everyone wants to watch and follow? Many of them got their breaks by being able to clue in on proper hashtag usage.
For most of us, figuring out what #hashtag to add at the end of a simple tweet can be an unnerving experience, with most just giving up and hashtagging the expected, boring old #words/phrases. But, by using the right—i.e., the best—hashtags, you can increase your company’s visibility on social media platforms, which can only increase your brand awareness.
Flick uses analytics to identify which hashtags your target audience (prospective customers) is using and creates content to engage with them. And should you wish, Flick can examine your competitor’s hashtags and provide insight into why they are or are not successful.
Mailchimp is a one-stop marketing platform that provides you with a host of email marketing, automation and customer relationship management assistance. It can help you keep your customers informed about the latest products, sales and even company news. Mailchimp uses AI-powered automation that you can use to personalize emails and SMS (short message service)—i.e., text messages—to your customers’ personal behaviors. Moreover, it can also help improve your brand recognition via its design and brand identity tools and can be used within other platforms like e-commerce or social media to manage your marketing campaigns.
Customer Relationship Management and Engagement
Crystal Knows (crystalknows.com) examines customer personality to learn what motivates them, allowing you to adapt your sales approaches to specific personality types. You can call it “communication tailoring” because, after analyzing your customer base, Crystal Knows recommends a word or phrase for you to use in your emails and other marketing to personalize the messaging to match targeted consumers’ lifestyles.
The app can also help train your sales team to be better at speaking, writing and selling to different buyer personalities. However, whether or not that sounds genuine, well, that’s not for us to decide. All we know is that Crystal Knows can help enhance customer engagement and provide personalized shopping experiences. That’s important because it helps drive growth.
HR, Employee Recruitment and Management
Our previous AI article mentioned both Sniper AI (recruitmentsmart.com/sniper-ai) and Manatal (manatal.com), but because Manatal caters more to HR teams, recruitment agencies and headhunters, we’ll look at Sniper AI and how it can help a retail company recruit new employees and manage HR issues.
Sniper AI utilizes machine learning to read résumés and identify top candidates based on specific job requirements. On many online job-hunting sites, bots look over candidates’ cover letters and résumés for keywords—hint, often those previously mentioned in the job description.
For a retail florist, Sniper AI can provide a faster and more accurate screening of applicants by ensuring that selected candidates have the necessary floral knowledge, retail experience or whatever you’re seeking. And, because it’s not human, Sniper AI will also remove the chance of human bias during the selection process.
Sales Management
HubSpot CRM (hubspot.com) is one of those neat AI programs that can help you with your sales management solutions, including identifying, tracking and nurturing promising sales leads and opportunities. With its detailed analytics and reporting, HubSpot CRM will help you understand customer data and be better able to forecast future sales.
HubSpot CRM also helps maintain and even improve your customer relationships, streamline sales processes and improve operational efficiency. It has a centralized database that anyone on your team can access to pull up full details on a customer, including past purchases. Having customers’ data at your fingertips allows you to personalize contact with each customer. Happy birthday, indeed. It’s a small thing, but for some people, being remembered is important. Now, for the best part: It’s easy for small businesses to use—and it’s free.
Project Management and Scheduling
There are quite a few programs out there that have project management and scheduling solutions to help a business—ClickUp, Asana, Monday.com, Wrike, Nuclino and Jiro, among others—but we like (and use) Trello (trello.com). Trello not only helps you organize and manage individual tasks and projects, but its learning curve is swift, as well. Trello’s task management system uses an online board-and-card system in which individual task cards move across your customized task progression checklist until completion. In addition, each task can be set for repetition, helping to avoid inputting errors.
Business Presentation Creation
Whenever you need to show off what your company can do when trying to nail down an event customer, a corporate account or whatever type of client you’re pursuing, having the Storydoc (storydoc.com) platform to showcase your business presentation is a must. While Beautiful.ai and Tome/Magical Tome are other worthy options, Storydoc helps you create interactive decks to show your current and past work, and it can turn the more complex aspects of a presentation into graphs and other picto-illustrative methods to allow you to communicate with customers effectively and sell them on your skills.
Photo and Art Generation and Editing
Well, hello DALL-E 2! Developed by OpenAI, this AI system can create realistic product images, illustrations and art from a written or spoken description. No kidding! You can use DALL-E 2 (openai.com/dall-e-2) to generate custom product images for websites, news articles, social media posts and more that align with your brand identity, to help your business stand out from the competition. It means creating visually appealing images of flower arrangements, bouquets, individual flowers and more.
By describing the desired arrangement, colors and style, for example, DALL·E 2 will turn that description into unique visuals. It can also take a photograph or painting and enhance it, make it larger (or smaller), or even rework the colors, where the flower petals are now white rather than yellow, for example, so you can use the same photo and show flowers in different hues or color palettes. And, if you aren’t sure what to do, you could always ask DALL-E 2 for some advice by giving a brief description to receive some creative options.
Video and Audio Creation, Editing, and Manipulation
Murf AI (murf.ai) can help you create better and more influential videos. Murf AI does not create visuals or copy, but it does generate text-to-speech audio content for creating realistic, human-sounding voiceovers for videos, presentations, podcasts and other audio projects. Heck, who wouldn’t want a Salma Hayek- or Sean Connery-like voice to sell flowers? The realistic voices generated by Murf AI have clarity and expression, and the content can be translated into multiple languages.
Speech-to-text Translation Services
How can speech-to-text translation help a retail flower business? Well, Fireflies.ai (fireflies.ai) offers real-time meeting transcription, with search and analysis features, which is valuable for capturing discussions during client consultations, team meetings, vendor negotiations and more. And, while you probably won’t need all of them, Fireflies.ai can transcribe audio into 69 languages—because sometimes a customer may be more confident describing specific things in another language. Furthermore, Fireflies.ai has high transcription accuracy, according to its users.
Fireflies.ai works easily with many different video conferencing and online meeting platforms, including Zoom, Skype, Microsoft Teams, GoToMeeting, Google Meet, BlueJeans, Dialpad, Webex and Lifesize. All you have to do is sign up for a free account, log in, upload the audio file, and watch it quickly and accurately transcribe.
Space restrictions limit us to talking about only one speech-to-text transcription service, but if this intrigues you, also check out Otter.AI (otter.ai).
Website and App Generation
Bricabrac (bricabrac.ai) is an AI-powered custom app generator that lets you—who probably has zero coding knowledge—create web-based tools, apps and even games. It uses natural language-processing technology from GPT-4 to amazingly turn a text description into a fully functional web app. All you have to do is describe what you want, and it will produce a fully responsive interface. From there, you can list features you want the app to have, and it will create the functions. Did you make a mistake? Ask it to edit to your satisfaction.
You can use Bricabrac to create an online catalog to showcase your flower arrangements and other offerings, allowing customers to browse and make selections. Add an ordering system app where customers can place orders for delivery or pickup. Build an app specific to your wedding planning or event needs, allowing customers to select floral designs they might want or request custom floral décor. You can also use Bricabrac to create flower care instructions for different types of flowers, helping customers and recipients keep their arrangements fresh. Bonus: Bricabrac will host your app for free.
AI and Chatbot Development
Because we couldn’t, in all honesty, figure out what Google AI really does, let’s look at Chatfuel (chatfuel.com) and what it has to teach us about chatbot development. First off, what is a chatbot? That’s when you go onto a website and over in a corner, a window pops up to say that “Chuck” (or whoever) is available to answer any question you may have about the company or website. That’s a chatbot.
Chatfuel creates AI-powered chatbots for use on various social media platforms. Along with online sales and customer support, Chatfuel will send a personalized message to, for example, remind any customer who abandoned his or her online flower order, encouraging him/her to complete the purchase. If a repeat online customer signs in, the Chatfuel bot looks at the customer’s previous preferences and recommends suitable current options.
Because it’s a bot, Chatfuel can—without guilt—upsell customers or cross-sell them items similar to what they are purchasing by chatting with them. On many online food delivery services, customers are upsold on buying a product the store has too much of or reminded that they once bought chocolate chip banana muffins, and wouldn’t that be nice to add to this week’s purchase? Yes, yes, it would.
The Chatfuel bot is your mouthpiece. It can answer standard questions and resolve common issues via its automated responses. You can connect it with Stripe, Google Sheets, HubSpot, et al., and use it to streamline messaging, track user behavior, and then target your messaging based on audience segmentation. It even monitors engagement metrics in real time, allowing you, if you are paying attention, to optimize your messaging strategy.
To review all of the options in these and other AI-assisted categories that we presented earlier this year in our article “AI and Your Flower Business,” refer to our March 2024 issue or our website at floristsreview.com/ai-and-your-flower-business.
